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Sun Sentinel: If Dolphins Draft A Defensive Player at #14, One Player Stands Out

Discussion in 'Miami Dolphins Forum' started by shamegame13, Feb 21, 2015.

  1. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    Well, the paywalls are certainly an important source of income; they were instituted because ad revenue wasn't enough. So, certainly if one limits the discussion to paywalls (which is what I explicitly talked about), my analogy is right on. Secondly, regarding copyright law, it doesn't matter if you are negating ALL sources of income, just that there is a financial hit taken, so whether other sources of income are nullified or not is irrelevant with respect to the law.

    And finally, they don't generate ad revenue just by going to the site. At least most of the time you have to click on those ads. Whether a person does that or not is not known. Similarly, if one takes my insistence on proper attribution, then one could claim that theoretically the author could still benefit from increased traffic even if you post the entire article. In both cases, it depends on another action that is made more likely, but is not guaranteed (as opposed to just reading the article for free).

    The analogy was good.
     
  2. Fin D

    Fin D Sigh

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    You were making a declaration as to why you don't feel bad about stealing intellectual property. You've tried to justify it saying Google lets you circumvent paywalls. The whole copyright thing you're bringing up backs my stance not your btw.

    Yes, just visiting the site generates revenue, just like turning on a TV station generates revenue, because viewership/clicks dictates how much advertisers will pay to use your site for delivering ads.
     
  3. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    Yeah, I'm saying that in many cases (obviously not all) there's a greater value to society if one allows free dissemination of information that one is not supposed to have without paying for it.

    Let's take a more well-defined category of cases: information that is MEANT to be public (so not national security stuff for example) but reaches a smaller audience because you have to pay for it. Examples would be most textbooks, scientific journal articles (recently published, in most journals), articles behind paywalls at news sites, etc..

    In general, the only argument I can see against "stealing" this information and disseminating it to the public (it was MEANT to be disseminated to as broad an audience as possible) is that content providers will cease creating that type of content. So, in general, I'd say where there's evidence content providers won't cease creating that type of content it's better for society to have that (stolen) information.

    Take scientific journal articles. Most important ones require readers to pay, and won't make articles available for free online until some time passes (not all journals are this way of course). In practice, the institution you work for just gives you access and pays them, but many other people that could benefit from this information don't have access without paying (scientists in poorer institutions/countries, or just the general public). The content creators will NOT cease production, and there are so many journals competing (including ones that publish for free) that you don't need to lament the financial demise of one specific journal. I see no reason not to create a pdf of such an article one is supposed to pay for and send it for free to others. In fact, everyone basically does that, so that's proof the journals are not going under because of it.

    Can you think of a reason in that one specific case why stealing info is bad?


    And yes, you're right that ad revenue is generated in many cases through an "impression" only, but as I said in the majority of cases (I think it's 2/3 or so) you need to click on the ads for revenue. Point is, it doesn't matter from a legal perspective whether you've eliminated all potential sources of revenue, just that some revenue was lost, which is why a link that circumvents a paywall (with google, you essentially have no paywall at that site) is doing something analogous to posting an article with proper attribution.
     
  4. Fin D

    Fin D Sigh

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    Your hero of the people stance is defeated by the fact that we're talking about a sports editorialist's speculation about which player a football team might draft in two months.
     
  5. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    I'm only defending my claim. Obviously, the less important the information, the less important it becomes to take the stance I'm taking.
     
  6. shamegame13

    shamegame13 Madison & Surtain

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    FYI, I had a link on here with author, everybody started complaining that they couldnt read it and told me to paste the story because they couldnt get past paywall. I had no idea it would create this much of an uproar.
     
  7. cbrad

    cbrad .

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    Yeah, there was nothing wrong with your intentions.
     
    shamegame13 likes this.
  8. shamegame13

    shamegame13 Madison & Surtain

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    I understand NOW that it was a TOS violation but people gotta relax. It was an honest mistake.
     
    OkiePhin likes this.

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